Hatch.lk is a combination of technology incubator and co-working space, and a good example of how much has changed in Sri Lanka in recent years.
It is a new venture that symbolises the possibility of modern Sri Lanka: confident and cool, blind to religion, race and gender, and not poisoned by politics. And it is well-equipped to nurture tech startups from its offices, one in Colombo’s downtown Fort district and the other in Jaffna, the main city in the island’s war-ravaged and now re-emerging Tamil north.
Colombo’s Fort district was once a thriving, south Asian Wall Street. But it became an economic target for the Tamil Tigers during a 26-year-long separatist conflict with the Sri Lankan state, and it suffered some of the war’s most devastating attacks: in 1996, a suicide bomb at Sri Lanka’s central bank killed 91, and a year later, an assault on the capital’s World Trade Centre, which housed banks, their regulators and the stock exchange, killed another 15.
It was rats to cats to bats in there when we first saw it, but it had something very special
Many of Fort’s banking halls and corporate headquarters were abandoned and the area became a no-man’s-land fortified by military checkpoints that few bothered to cross.
